Sorting Hobgoblins: Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Catalogue Spirits

Few words in English are as cheerfully vague as “hobgoblin.” In 1787 the antiquary Francis Grose, collecting provincial words from counties across England, marked it as a northern word and defined it in five words: “An apparition, fairy or spirit.”¹ That looseness is the subject of this article. Across the eighteenth century, clergymen, lexicographers and antiquaries tried to say what hobgoblins and their companions were, where the words came from, and how the crowd of household spirits, bogeys and night terrors of rural belief might be put in order. Their efforts tell us less about goblins than about the writers, who were sorting other people’s beliefs into categories that suited their own learned, Protestant outlook.

A list made to be laughed at

The eighteenth-century writers inherited their starting point from the sixteenth. In 1584 Reginald Scot published The Discoverie of Witchcraft, an attack on witch prosecutions that treated most supernatural fears as fraud, illusion or the leftovers of childhood. In a chapter on “vaine apparitions,” Scot explained where those fears came from. In childhood, he wrote, “our mothers maids have so terrified us” with an ugly horned devil, and then with a torrent of names: “bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes,” and so on through centaurs, imps, changelings, “Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fierdrake, the puckle,” ending with “Tom thombe, hob gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes.”²

This was not a classification. Scot set classical creatures (satyrs, tritons), Christian demons (incubus), human practitioners (conjurors) and English nursery figures side by side because, for his argument, they belonged to one class: “bugs,” things that frighten. The list does its work through accumulation. The longer it runs, the sillier the whole collection looks. Elsewhere Scot made the prediction behind the joke explicit. “Heretofore Robin goodfellow, and Hob gobblin were as terrible, and also as credible to the people, as hags and witches be now,” he wrote, and he expected that witches would one day be as “derided and contemned” as Robin Goodfellow.²

Scot’s list proved durable in a way he could not have planned. Its names were copied by at least one later collector, and a version of it was still being expanded in the north of England more than 250 years later, as the last section of this article shows.

Explaining the word: Johnson’s hopping goblin

The first problem for an eighteenth-century scholar was the word itself. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) gave two competing explanations of “hobgoblin.” The entry reads in part: “according to Skinner, for robgoblins, from Robin Goodfellow, Hob being the nickname of Robin: but more probably, according to Wallis and Junius, hopgoblins empusae, because they do not move their feet.” Johnson added Wallis’s further claim that this explained “the boys play of fox in the hole, the fox always hopping on one leg,” and then illustrated the word with a line he credited to Shakespeare: “Crier hobgoblin, make the fairy o-yes.”³

In the copy consulted, Johnson gives no separate definition: the etymology and the Shakespeare quotation do the work. That choice may say something about how Johnson approached the word: he treated the hobgoblin as a creature known from old books and plays, and his task as tracing its pedigree.

The “hopgoblin” theory came with a learned Latin gloss, empusae, which gave the English bogey a classical relative. Twenty-two years later the Newcastle antiquary John Brand repeated Junius’s version: hobgoblins were a kind of goblin named because they were imagined to move by hopping on one leg rather than walking. Brand reported a similar guess about “Boggle-Boe” from Welsh and from a nurse’s frightening noise, and then added a dry verdict on the whole exercise: “Well has Etymology been called the Eruditio ad libitum!”⁴ The eighteenth century had no settled answer, and some of its scholars knew it.

The parson’s view: Henry Bourne, 1725

In 1725 Henry Bourne, curate of the chapel of All Saints in Newcastle upon Tyne, published Antiquitates Vulgares; or, the Antiquities of the Common People. A chapter (the tenth in Brand’s later reprint) takes up the “Country Conversation in a Winter’s Evening,” where families sat by the fire telling stories of apparitions. Bourne granted that genuine apparitions had occurred, but held that almost all ghost stories rested on “the Fears and Fancies, and weak Brains of Men.” Herdsmen and shepherds, he noted, all claimed to have seen apparitions, which he put down to fear and imagination.⁵⁴

Bourne’s ordering was historical and confessional. He described the popular picture of fairies, dressed in green, dancing in rings at night and baking cakes, and traced it to ancient beliefs about the Lamiae, which were said to carry off children, and to the Fauns, the gods of the woods. The rest of the crowd he assigned to a period. In “the benighted Ages of Popery,” he wrote, hobgoblins and “Sprights” haunted towns, villages, waters and woods alike. Once that cloud had been dispelled, which in context means the Reformation, those spirits did “vanish at the Dawn of Truth and the Light of Knowledge.”⁴

This is classification by origin. Fairies were pagan survivals; hobgoblins and sprites were Catholic error; the Protestant present had outgrown both. The scheme let a Church of England curate write about popular belief without seeming to endorse it, and Brand, as the next section shows, kept the same question of origins even when he disagreed with the answer.

Brand’s additions: brownies, Persians and footnotes

When Brand reissued Bourne’s book in 1777 as Observations on Popular Antiquities, he printed the original text in full and attached “addenda” to each chapter.⁴ His notes to the chapter on spirits read like a filing cabinet being reorganized. He added the brownies of Scotland, which, he reported from a Scottish glossary, were said to do household drudgery for anyone who treated them civilly, and to be named for the swarthy complexion they had acquired from hard labour, in contrast to the “fair” fairies. They were, the passage added, “now extinct as well as the Fairies.”

Brand also challenged his predecessor’s genealogy. Fairies, he suggested, were more likely of Eastern than Roman origin, invented by Persians and Arabs, whose religion and history, he wrote, were full of tales about them and gave them a country of their own, Fairy Land.⁴ The disagreement matters less than its form. Both men assumed that the right way to understand a spirit was to find out where it had come from, and both wrote from a position of learned distance.

Grose’s method: headings, definitions and dialect

The antiquary Francis Grose went furthest in giving the subject a system. His Provincial Glossary of 1787 ends with a long section on “Popular Superstitions.” It opens with the observation that every reader carries a store of such notions picked up in childhood from “stories of ghosts, witches, and fairies, told us by our maids and nurses,” the same source Scot had blamed two centuries earlier.¹²

Grose then announced a plan: “In order to give a methodical view of the different kinds of Superstition now and formerly current in this country,” he would arrange the material under heads. The list runs from ghosts and witches through fairies, corpse candles, second sight, omens, things lucky and unlucky, charms, divination and sympathy.¹ Under each head he defined the being or practice, gave its supposed habits, and supplied examples from earlier books.

His account of fairies shows the method at work. Fairies, “according to the popular accounts of them,” are “a sort of intermediate beings between men and spirits,” with bodies that can turn invisible. Grose then lists their attributes in order: small stature, green clothing, dancing rings, a love of cleanliness, cake-baking, the stealing of children, and the leaving of changelings. He added subtypes. The “Knockers” of Welsh mines, he wrote, pointed miners to rich veins, while Scotland had domestic fairies called brownies, and fairies were said to shoot cattle with flint-headed arrows, whose heads, often found, were called “elf-shots.”¹ Even devils received ranks. Grose, who had read Scot, copied out “two or three” entries from Scot’s list of the chief devils summoned by conjurors.¹ The evil spirits that witches were believed to send into their victims, Grose reported from what exorcists claimed the spirits had told them, “are also of different ranks and degrees,” and he copied out a list of their names, among them one called Hob.¹

The glossary itself, arranged alphabetically and marked by region, offers a different kind of order. Alongside “Hobbgoblin,” marked as a northern word, Grose entered “Hobthrust, or rather Hob o t’hurst,” which he glossed as “A spirit, supposed to haunt woods only.” From Hampshire he recorded the “Colt-pixy,” a spirit or fairy in the shape of a horse that neighs and “misleads horses into bogs.” He also entered “boggart” as a word for a spectre, with the phrase “to take boggart” used of a horse that shies at something in the hedge or road, and the Cumberland “swarth,” the fetch or ghost of a dying man.¹ Here the spirits are sorted by place and by the words people used. Of the writers discussed here, it is the closest any came to recording belief as speakers held it, rather than as a scholar explained it away.

After Grose: the catalogue becomes a game

The eighteenth-century projects had a long afterlife. Between 1846 and 1859 Michael Aislabie Denham printed a series of tracts that the Folk-Lore Society later reissued.⁶ In one of them he looked back to a time “seventy or eighty years ago and upwards,” roughly the period of Brand and Grose, when, he wrote, the earth was overrun with spirits. What follows is a list of more than 180 names: boggles, brownies, bugbears, barguests, hobgoblins, “hob-thrusts,” “colt-pixies,” “swarths,” and, carried over from Scot, satyrs, pans, “spoorns,” “hell-wains,” “fire-drakes,” “kit-a-can-sticks” and “Tom-tumblers.” Among the less familiar entries is “hobbits.” He rounded off the list with the claim “that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost,” a tongue-in-cheek passage in which he had just called the belief that people born on Christmas Day cannot see spirits “another incontrovertible fact.”⁶

Denham’s footnotes tie many names to real places, such as a “Boggle-house” or a farm called Hag-House, and to local ghost stories.⁶ In that respect he followed Grose’s attention to region. In shape, though, his list returns to Scot’s: a comic flood of names whose length is the joke. The Scot names it carries over show how a sixteenth-century polemic passed into the folklorist’s word list, losing its argument and keeping its vocabulary.

Read together, these sources show three ways of sorting hobgoblins. Scot lumped them together as bugs to be dismissed. Bourne and Brand sorted them by origin, pagan or popish, Roman or Persian. Grose sorted them by kind and by county, and treated definition as a form of record. None of these writers believed in hobgoblins, although Bourne and Grose both acknowledged that such stories were still told and believed in their own day. Their classifications tended to place popular belief safely in the past while preserving it on the page, and it is partly through their books that so many of the names survive.

Footnotes

1. Grose 1787, glossary s.v. Hobbgoblin, Hobthrust, Colt-pixy, Boggart, Swarth; “Popular Superstitions,” introduction, Ghosts, Witches, Fairies, and the passage quoting Reginald Scot’s list of chief devils. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Scot 1584 (Nicholson reprint 1886), Book 7, ch. 15 (list of bugs) and ch. 2 (Robin goodfellow and Hob gobblin). ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Johnson 1755, vol. 1, s.v. “Hobgoblin.” ↩

4. Brand 1777, reprint of Bourne ch. 10 and Brand’s addenda (notes on brownies, Junius, boggle-boe, origin of fairies). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Bourne 1725, title page and chapter on country conversation in a winter’s evening. ↩

6. Denham Tracts, vol. 2 (1895), “Folklore of the North of England,” pp. 76-80; title page. ↩ ↩² ↩³